Tombstone
A marker that indicates a deleted record in a distributed database. Since replicas may not see the delete immediately, the tombstone prevents deleted data from being resurrected.
What is Tombstone?
A marker that indicates a deleted record in a distributed database. Since replicas may not see the delete immediately, the tombstone prevents deleted data from being resurrected.
Tombstone is a advanced concept that sits in the Consistency Models area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "Tombstone" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
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See also
Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
Eventual Consistency
A consistency model where updates propagate asynchronously and all replicas will eventually converge to the same value. Trades immediacy for availability.
LSM Tree
Log-Structured Merge Tree: a write-optimized data structure that buffers writes in memory and periodically flushes sorted runs to disk. Used by Cassandra, RocksDB, and LevelDB.
Anti-Entropy
A background process that compares data between replicas and fixes differences. Uses Merkle trees to efficiently identify which data ranges are out of sync.